Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905, Stanley Jasspon Kunitz was the youngest of three children of Russian-Jewish parents. Six weeks before Kunitz's birth, his father, a thirty-nine-yearold dress manufacturer, killed himself in a park by ingesting carbolic acid. Kunitz's mother kept the family going by supporting herself as a supervising seamstress and married again when Kunitz was eight. But her new husband died just one year later. In high school, Kunitz was captain of the debating team, founder of a literary magazine (in which he printed his first poem), and class valedictorian. During these years, Kunitz worked summers at the Worcester Telegram as a cub reporter. After high school, he attended Harvard, where he won the Lloyd McKim Garrison Medal for Poetry in 1926. That same year he graduated summa cum laude. He completed a master's degree at Harvard in 1927, and expected to teach there, but was not hired because...